Post-APOCALYPSE #1: Rolls and risks, in-game and out

August 25, 2026

In case you missed my possibly too subtle footnote in Five Years in the Apocalypse, APOCALYPSE FRAME 2nd Edition is in the works.[^1] When envisioning what this would look like, I decided to take this back to some of the first principles mechanically. One huge one from the start was the core rolling mechanic.

[^1] Which is to say, not coming out anytime before Celestial Bodies is ready because I want to make sure fulfillment is done before it even sniffs crowdfunding, but since that’s currently in editing I have more time to think about other things now.

The initial approach #

LUMEN uses a variation on the FitD-ish roll Xd6, take highest. It’s the same kind of roll, but FitD splits the now-relatively-classic ternary as such:

• 1-3: Fail
• 4-5: Weak Success (aka success with consequence, partial success, etc)
• 6: Full Success

Whereas LUMEN bumps each of those bands a little:

• 1-2: Fail
• 3-4: Weak Success
• 5-6: Full Success

Let’s look at like, 1-4 dice because that’s standard. In FitD, you’ve got a solid chance at some kind of success as long as you’ve got at least 2 dice (50% -> 75% -> 88% -> 94%), but a relatively slimmer chance at full success¹ (17% -> 31% -> 42% -> 52%). In LUMEN, however, this is a very different story. Your chance to succeed at all quickly skyrockets (67% -> 89% -> 96% -> 99%), and your chance to fully succeed isn’t far behind (33% -> 56% -> 70% -> 80%). Once you’re rolling 3 dice it’s barely a question.

In looking at how AF worked out generally, I decided I wanted rolls to hit that middle result a little more often, because it’s more dynamic and interesting if enemies get attacks more frequently off-turn (and in turn, fewer act at the end of the turn, if any at all). If we’re rolling (and I like the roll-with-armaments/don’t-roll-systems dichotomy, so we are indeed rolling) I want it to kind of matter more than it currently does. I do want failure on the table occasionally, but I didn’t want to fail much more often. This is a “succeeding” kind of game generally: the question is usually “did anything else happen” rather than “did it work”. So I cobbled together² a hybrid approach:

• 1-2: Fail
• 3-5: Weak Success
• 6: Full Success

This means a LUMEN level of success (67% -> 89% -> 96% -> 99%) but FitD level of full success (17% -> 31% -> 42% -> 52%). So the general most likely result across rolls of all kinds is, clocking in at about half the time, a “weak success” result (50% -> 58% -> 54% -> 47%).

Alright, pardner. Keep on (re)rollin’, baby #

One thing you should know about original APOCALYPSE FRAME, if you haven’t played it, is that you can spend Tension to both get more actions and also reroll. In theory, this was to reward players for not using rerolls and just taking hits. The thing about this rule ( and basically all rerolls) is that it greatly slows the game down because now it puts a decision point down every time you don’t fully succeed at a roll. It was the slowest part of the game in a walk, with drops as a close second (and drops have already been changed). It also made it less of a “roll to see if you hit” and more of a “roll to see how many Tension you spend total”. So that’s no good. Rerolls are out.

We’re making folks succeed fully less and removing rerolls. How do we think that’s going to go?

You know what time it is (it’s time for PCs to get wrecked) #

The thing about changing one aspect is that it affects everything else going forward. One thing it affects is PC longevity.

With no mitigating factors, the net effect is that this is going to mess PCs up, real bad compared to the original game. This is no good! I still want to keep the wildly busted action economy and general vibe and that means that on average, with no further changes, players taking a bunch of actions are sending themselves to the junkyard nearly as fast as enemies.

Now obviously I knew this going into it because I can do math, so I had a plan. So what did I land on?

A solution, of sorts #

Well, first off, because attribute rolls both exist and use the same rolling thresholds, attributes are a bit higher. Total of 8 (minimum 1, maximum 4) instead of 6 (minimum 1, maximum 3). This gives a few more spreads to work with, but bear in mind that attributes also add to resources, so as a side bonus this gives a little higher attribute average and more variability there. (We’ll get back to this later.) But APOCALYPSE FRAME doesn’t use those for attacks and that’s where we have to worry way more about it because those can happen, like, several times per player per turn, and unless I’m really bloating the number of dice rolled, the chance of rolling a 6 only goes so high. So there’s got to be a little more to it.

Take a risk! #

Tension, as mentioned, is a resource can grant both extra actions and rerolls in the original AF 1E. It’s kind of like heat or something in other mech games. If you think about it for like 2 seconds, though, this is conceptually redundant with the default 2 actions everyone gets. So one move I made for this is that I just…increased Tension by 2 and made it so you regain 2 per round, and suddenly it’s the same idea but we’re only tracking one property instead and you just always need to spend a resource to take actions. This is tangential, but it makes the next bit make a little more sense.

As originally written, an action + reroll is 2 tension’s worth. So what if we just make that a thing people have to bake in before attacking?

Risky Attack: Spend 1 Tension. Pick an armament and a target in its range. Roll the Armament’s listed number of dice and take the highest:

• 6 (Good Hit): Deal the Armament’s Harm and any other effects to the target.
• 3-5 (Weak Hit): Deal the Armament’s Harm and any other effects to the target, but an enemy is activated.
• 1-2 (Miss): An enemy is activated.

Careful Attack: Spend 2 Tension. Pick an armament and a target in its range. Roll the Armament’s listed number of dice and take the highest:

• 3-6 (Good Hit): Deal the Armament’s Harm and any other effects to the target.
• 1-2 (Miss): An enemy is activated.

So: you either choose to do the reliable thing (remember, a miss is 11% or less with 2+ dice, which most things have) or do a riskier thing but it takes half the resources. (And now that we have that precedent on the books, we can make other things cost a little more sometimes. And now we have Good hit vs weak hit vs any hit and risky attack vs careful attack to key mechanics off of, and I’m always in favor of adding those kinds of design levers where it makes sense.)

So now we have 3 ways to take actions in combat:

• Spend 1 Tension to do Move, Risky Attack, Quick Interact (aka Drive/Speed/fast actions).
• Spend 2 Tension to do Careful Attack, Careful Interact (aka Control/deliberate actions).
• Spend 1 Fuel to Use a System.

Does this get us there? Well, not fully.

The inherent “tension” in making major changes #

So here’s the thing. Any given player is still going to use way more Tension than they would in the original game for the same number of actions. You’re only using that reroll if you need it - so if you don’t roll a full success, well, you just pop it then. And not only that, a really key thing here is that it makes 1-2 die attacks much more dangerous: if we’re just making weak hits into good with an extra tension, a miss is still a miss. And on top of that, your good hit chance is way lower for the same tension spent up front! So whether or not I wanted players to fail more often…well, now they do. And on top of that, less actions means less drops which means less future actions. So what now?

There’s a couple of things we can/should do here to even things out. For one, 1-2 die weapons should be rare-ish. The ones that exist should either also do something on a miss, or have some quality where they gain accuracy in certain circumstances - a few tags gave +1 die in certain circumstances, for instance.

The other move is just to give players a bit more resources of all kinds to throw around. Extras mean that players who really don’t want to constantly get shot in return don’t have to as much, players who are willing to risk it (or take strategies to mitigate it, like using defensive systems/features or cover) can eat a little more without immediately bricking, and players who mostly want to lean on no-roll systems have more ability to do so. The attribute bump already helps a bit with this (given 2 extra attributes means 2 extra resources) and drops are already changing in a way that gives a strike team of 3+ people considerably more Tension/Vigor recovery on average than 1E. But it almost certainly needs to be more than that, so it’s a matter of tweaking until it gets to a quantity where it feels right.

This is where I’m at in playtesting: the general vibe hits how I want it to hit. It’s mostly a question of tweaking around the edges.

Why take a chance? #

I quickly want to address the, uh, less savory part of all of this, because it feels worth mentioning. Skip down if talking business offends you or something.

If we look at this in the most crass, commercial way, we have to ask: to what degree is it it worth revising this? People like the game as-is and it’s sold hundreds of copies digitally and physically, considerably more than anything else I’ve written and properly released. I could probably release a Revised edition with some polished mechanics, more illustrations, and some extras in there and it’d sell fine. Whenever you deviate from a winning formula, it begs the question: is this what everyone, or at least a critical mass of people, wants or is at least willing to accept? And am I willing to accept that the answer may be “no”?

For the sake of zeroing in on what I want to do with this, I have to be willing to accept that. I don’t want to put myself in a position where I release (or re-release) something as-is just to do it when I’m in a position to do better. Making a change to something that works is a risk, but if the alternative is creative stagnation, there’s no other choice in my mind. (And in the end, I think it’ll go over well enough.)

Next time I’ll talk about the setup for enemies, weapons, and systems, probably. They’re all changing together in more or less the same way: becoming less templated and more unique.

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